Colossians 1:14

Redemption] The view that the word means ransom is very dubious. 'Deliverance' is the best translation. Omit through his blood.

15-23. The supremacy of the Son in the universe and the Church.

Paraphrase. '(15) This Son of God's love, in whom we have our deliverance, the pardon of our sins, is the exact image of God, so that while God is the invisible, He is manifested to us in His Son. (16) The Son also possesses the first-born's dominion over every creature in virtue of the fact that the creation of all things depended on Him, whether in heaven or on earth, whether visible or invisible. Let it be specially observed that in the 'all things' thus created must be included the Angelic powers of the loftiest orders. All things I say have come into existence by His agency, and He is the goal for which they have been created. (17) He is before all things and the principle of their cohesion. (18) And this preëminence in the universe is matched by His preëminence in the Church. He is the Head of the body, inasmuch as He is the ruler who has passed to His dominion from the dead, in order that He who is from the first supreme in the universe may become supreme in the Church, and thus be supreme in every sphere. (19, 20) This position He attained because God was well pleased that all the fulness of His Grace should dwell in His Son, and thus reconcile through Him all things to Himself. It was through the blood shed on His Cross that peace was thus made. And the scope of this reconciliation was universal, it embraced not things in earth alone, but those in the heavens; (21) aye, and you Colossians, too, once estranged from God and hostile to Him though you were. (22, 23) Now you have been reconciled in the Son's fleshly body through His death, to present yourselves blameless before God, if you stand unshaken in the Gospel.' The aim of this great exposition of the nature and work of the Son is to accord to Him the supreme position alike in the world and the Church, and sweep away the false teaching which assigned to angelic mediators the position and functions of the Son. He and not they created, sustains, and rules the universe; they, even the loftiest, are merely His creatures. He, and not they, is the Redeemer, they are among the redeemed.